What is the WordMasters Challenge™?

The WordMasters Challenge™ is a national competition for students in grades 3-8 that encourages growth in vocabulary and verbal reasoning. Each year, over 125,000 students from some of the best public and private schools throughout the United States participate in the WordMasters Challenge.

Unlike other language arts competitions for this age group – which focus on grammar, punctuation, spelling and other language mechanics – the WordMasters Challenge™ helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically. The contest addresses higher-level word comprehension and verbal reasoning in two ways:

It challenges students to complete analogies based on relationships among words they have learned.

It bases the analogies on special vocabulary lists, developed for each grade and difficulty level by experienced teachers, which participants are encouraged to study before each meet.

Excellence in the competition will require both a mastery of the meanings of the vocabulary words (of a difficulty appropriate to each grade level) and thoughtful reasoning about the relationships between these words and more familiar language used in the competition’s analogies. Click here to see some sample test analogies at each grade level from our Blue Division Challenge as well as our demanding Gold Division Challenge.